In the Name of Terrorism (review)

In the tempest of post-9/11 terrorism literature, Carol Winkler has stabilized the vessel long enough to get our bearings. In the Name of Terrorism examines the "terrorism" ideograph in presidential rhetoric since the Vietnam War, from Johnson through the Bush II administration. What distinguishes the book beyond rhetorical criticism is the legwork Winkler has done paging through internal memos and other primary documents deep in the presidential archives. Winkler grants us access to entire economies of negotiation, of compromises, speech drafts, warnings, suggestions, and internal polls. Winkler aims for the eye of the storm to examine the swirling eddies where the language of terrorism is initially crafted, all the while keeping a finger to the prevailing winds.

Rather than issuing any final verdicts on the meaning of terrorism, Winkler draws out an evolutionary thread. Her narrative begins early in the Vietnam conflict, where the presidential rhetoric of terrorism was born. John Kennedy described the Viet Cong as the "communist terror." To gain Vietnamese sympathy for the American mission, "terrorism" proved to be a useful term. For the American audience, "terrorism" motivated less than "communism" and "totalitarianism," but the three began their association here, she argues. Johnson strengthened this Cold War assemblage by describing Viet Cong terrorism as a tool for destabilizing democracy.

The episode that would initiate a robust contemporary discourse of terrorism was the Iranian hostage crisis of the Carter administration, which significantly shifted the dominant rhetoric of terrorism. Carter did not want to imply that the Muslim world was a Cold War enemy, especially during the U.S. support of the Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan. As such, Winkler writes that the administration decided on a crime metaphor—"criminals," "kidnappers," and "terrorists"—rather than linking the crisis with Vietnam-style terrorism. As acts of terrorism skyrocketed under Reagan, the administration would return to a war metaphor and christen the notion of "terrorist state," which was institutionalized in a State Department list of such states. This rhetorical strategy backfired somewhat in 1985 when, in a poll, 65 percent of the U.S. populace would describe the United States as a "terrorist state" due to its support of the Nicaraguan Contras (73). To remedy this rhetorical quandary, Winkler notes, the Reagan administration introduced the term "narco-terrorist" to once again isolate the terrorist actor. As an ideograph representing the American Opposite, Reagan suggested that acts of "terrorism" might be evidence of the strength of "democracy" in the Cold War world.

As the Cold War drew to a close, "terrorism" went from a subsidiary role to its current place as the prime anti-American ideograph. This happened, according to Winkler, during the build-up to the 1991 Gulf War. At first, the Bush I administration resisted the term "terrorism" to describe the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, even though Iraq held American hostages. When polls suggested that all other justifications for U.S. involvement were doomed to failure, the administration finally resorted to the terrorism trope. The shadow of Cold War rhetoric still remained, but whereas Reagan had argued that terrorism destroyed the "delicate flower" of emerging democracies, Bush argued that Hussein's terrorism upset a "New World Order." The defining aspect of Clinton's rhetoric of terrorism, according to Winkler, was a prophetic voice that went beyond the worldly order into more metaphysical realms. In response to various acts of violence, Clinton spoke in terms of absolute good and evil as well as the divine mission of the United States in stamping out evil. Clinton also expanded the purview of terrorism to include attacks in cyberspace, coining the neologism "cyberterrorism." The Clinton years transformed "terrorism" from a term used to describe similar, isolated phenomena to something like an international crime syndicate, an al Qaeda. Finally, Clinton attempted to collapse the domestic-foreign policy distinction, which would carry through into the Bush II administration's reiteration of the borderlessness of terrorism. The new terrorists after 9/11 were "non-state actors." So that a discourse of...